Chapter 29 — Quiz
Fourteen questions testing your grasp of UI/UX craft, history, and decision-making. Answer before checking the answer key.
Questions
1. According to the chapter, what is the difference between UI and UX?
a) UI is for consoles; UX is for mobile. b) UI is the surface (what the player sees); UX is the whole experience. c) UI is what the artist makes; UX is what the engineer makes. d) UI is for menus; UX is for gameplay.
2. Which game is cited as the canonical example of diegetic UI in the chapter?
a) Half-Life 2. b) Dead Space (2008). c) Borderlands 2. d) Persona 5.
3. What is a meta UI element?
a) A menu option that opens another menu. b) A non-diegetic UI element that responds to in-world events as if they affected the screen itself (e.g., blood splatter on the camera). c) The settings menu accessed from outside the game. d) Any tooltip that appears on hover.
4. The chapter argues that the HUD has three tiers. Which of the following is the correct ordering?
a) Hidden / Always Visible / Contextual. b) Always Visible / Contextual / Hidden. c) Critical / Optional / Decorative. d) Player-facing / System-facing / Debug.
5. The chapter contrasts Dark Souls's minimalist HUD with Borderlands 2's dense HUD. What is the chapter's verdict on which approach is "correct"?
a) Dark Souls's minimalist approach is always preferable. b) Borderlands 2's dense approach is always preferable. c) Both are correct for their respective games; the choice should be a thesis statement about the experience. d) Modern games should always default to a minimalist HUD.
6. What is the chapter's stated default delay for showing a hover tooltip?
a) 100 ms. b) 500 ms. c) 1.5 seconds. d) 2 seconds.
7. Which of the following is NOT cited in the chapter as a real cost of diegetic UI?
a) Slower to read than corner-of-screen UI. b) Higher tutorialization burden. c) More expensive engineering and art cost. d) Reduces battery life on mobile devices.
8. Hick's Law, as referenced in the chapter, states what?
a) Decision time scales logarithmically with the number of options. b) Movement time is proportional to distance and inverse to target size. c) Short-term memory holds about 7 items. d) Players will always choose the leftmost option.
9. Which game is the chapter's case study for accessibility excellence?
a) Forza Horizon 5. b) The Last of Us Part II. c) Hades. d) Microsoft Flight Simulator.
10. Which of the following is the chapter's recommendation about confirmation dialogs?
a) Always confirm every action that changes game state. b) Never use confirmation dialogs. c) Confirm destructive, undoable actions; do not confirm trivial actions; prefer undo affordances where possible. d) Use confirmation dialogs only on first playthrough.
11. What is the minimum readable font size for body text on a console game played at TV distance, per the chapter?
a) 12-16 px at 1080p. b) 28-32 px at 1080p. c) 48 px regardless of resolution. d) Whatever the engine defaults to.
12. When designing UI for a controller, what does the chapter identify as the most important architectural constraint that distinguishes it from mouse UI?
a) Controllers cannot display tooltips. b) Controllers require focus-driven navigation rather than free pointing. c) Controllers are always slower than keyboards. d) Controllers cannot navigate text fields.
13. The chapter mentions a translation challenge by name. Which language is famously about 30% longer than English?
a) French. b) Japanese. c) German. d) Spanish.
14. Celeste's assist mode (referenced from Chapter 11) is described as separating which of the following?
a) Difficulty settings from challenge sliders (game speed, infinite stamina, invincibility, etc., as separate options). b) Music from sound effects. c) Story mode from arcade mode. d) Tutorial from the main game.
15. What is the chapter's stance on settings menu placement?
a) Settings should only be accessible from the in-game pause menu so players cannot adjust them mid-launch. b) Settings should be accessible from the main menu, before the player starts the game, so accessibility-essential adjustments can be made up front. c) Settings should be accessed via a separate launcher application. d) Settings should be auto-detected; no menu is needed.
16. The chapter describes inventory design as falling into two philosophies. What are they?
a) Free-form vs. grid-based. b) Inventory-as-tool vs. inventory-as-gameplay. c) Pause-on-open vs. live. d) First-person vs. third-person.
Answer Key
1. b) UI is the surface; UX is the whole experience. The chapter develops this throughout, noting that you can have beautiful UI and bad UX (Destiny 2 inventory) or the reverse (Dwarf Fortress).
2. b) Dead Space (2008). The spine-health, holographic ammo, and in-world map projector are the canonical examples — and the basis of Case Study 29.1.
3. b) Meta UI is non-diegetic UI that responds to in-world events as if they affected the screen — blood splatter, screen cracks at low health, screen-edge red border. The category was developed by Erik Fagerholt and Magnus Lorentzon and is widely cited in modern UI scholarship.
4. b) Always Visible / Contextual / Hidden. Tier 1 is what the player needs every second; Tier 2 surfaces when relevant and disappears; Tier 3 lives behind a deliberate input.
5. c) Both are correct for their respective games. Dark Souls is about presence and atmosphere; Borderlands is about a Skinner box of numerical reward. The HUD is a thesis about what the experience is supposed to deliver.
6. b) 500 ms. Fast enough that "I want to know" gets answered; slow enough that idle-mouse hover does not show every tooltip every time.
7. d) Battery life is not mentioned as a cost. The real costs are speed, discoverability, flexibility, camera dependence, and genre fit.
8. a) Decision time scales logarithmically with the number of options. (Fitts's Law is the distance/size one; Miller's 7±2 is the short-term memory one.)
9. b) The Last of Us Part II. Over 60 accessibility options, paid disabled-gamer consultants, and the contemporary gold standard. Case Study 29.2 examines this in depth.
10. c) Confirm destructive, undoable actions; do not confirm trivial; prefer undo affordances. The chapter develops this with a table and the "boy who cried wolf" framing.
11. b) 28-32 px at 1080p minimum. The chapter notes that Dead Rising 1 shipped with text so small on standard-def TVs that whole groups of players literally could not read mission text — the cautionary example.
12. b) Focus-driven navigation. The chapter calls this the most important constraint and explains the focus_neighbor_* properties needed in Godot to make controller navigation work.
13. c) German. About 30% longer than English on average; Russian and Polish also run long. Localization-aware UI accounts for text-box flex.
14. a) Difficulty settings from challenge sliders. Celeste gives separate sliders for game speed, infinite stamina, invincibility, dash count, and air-dash, rather than conflating them as one "difficulty" choice. This is the model accessibility advocates point to.
15. b) Settings should be accessible from the main menu. The chapter is emphatic — burying settings in the in-game pause menu means players who need to adjust accessibility settings have to start the game, find a safe pause point, and then dig through menus. Unacceptable friction for a basic need.
16. b) Inventory-as-tool vs. inventory-as-gameplay. The first treats inventory as something the player should manage quickly (Skyrim-style lists). The second treats packing/managing as itself the game (Resident Evil 4's briefcase, Diablo II's grid). Choose deliberately; do not split the difference.
Scoring
- 13-14 correct: You have absorbed the chapter. Move on to the case studies.
- 10-12 correct: Solid grasp; revisit the questions you missed and re-read related sections.
- 7-9 correct: You have the main ideas but are fuzzy on details. Re-read the HUD hierarchy and accessibility sections especially.
- Under 7: The chapter deserves another pass. UI/UX is the layer that makes everything else feel professional; do not move on until the framework is in your head.
A Note on These Questions
The most important questions on this quiz are 1, 4, 9, 10, and 14 — they cover the chapter's central commitments. UI vs. UX as a vocabulary distinction. The three-tier HUD framework. The Last of Us Part II as the accessibility benchmark. Confirmation-dialog discipline. Celeste's assist mode as the model for accessibility-as-multiple-axes rather than accessibility-as-difficulty.
Specific questions (which game has which feature, exact font sizes, exact tooltip delays) matter less than the frameworks. If you missed one, look it up and move on. If you missed three or more of the framework questions, re-read the chapter — those are not optional pieces of vocabulary. Those are the architecture of how you will think about UI for the rest of your career.